The previous chapter attempted to challenge and revise the standard history of language in Liverpool by arguing that a distinctive form of language must have appeared in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus that the claim that the inhabitants of Liverpool used the same speech form as their Lancastrian neighbours as late as the 1830s is false. Notwithstanding this important revision, however, it is clear that the language of Liverpool must have been affected by the patterns of immigration to Liverpool (predominantly Irish but including other significant elements) in the mid to late nineteenth century. Evidence of the form itself is scant, though there are possible glimpses in literary accounts (always remembering, as noted earlier, the problems with textual material). Her Benny (1879), for example, the one book with which all Liverpool children used to be familiar, provides representations of the speech of Liverpool street kids that seem to confirm that there was indeed a distinct form in that environment at least. Thus on the opening page Nelly declares: ‘I'm glad as how they're lighting the lamps, anyhow. It'll make it feel a bit warmer, I reckon… for it's terrible cold.’ And later Benny, her brother, exclaims, ‘Be jabbers, it's a thripny… Oh, glory! … if 't ain't haaf a bob […] If he'd a-catched me, I'd got a walloping, an no mistake’ (Hocking 1966: 1, 14). It is also clear that there was some sense of the appearance of a distinctive local form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.